Love Is the Devil, the 1998 film directed by John Maybury, is many things: the first serious cinematic study of the life and art of painter Francis Bacon, a tour de force performance by Derek Jacobi, an unholy convocation of YBAs (including Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst) filling in as background extras; and perhaps, most remarkably in hindsight, an early sighting of 007 himself, Daniel Craig. Craig is rather brilliant in Love Is the Devil, playing the troubled George Dyer, Bacon's petty-criminal lover, who met the artist after crashing through his roof while attempting a break-in, and who killed himself in 1971. You can't say Craig doesn't go all the way for his art: the film includes a jaw-dropping scene of him in the bath, entirely in the altogether. Form a queue, people…

Love Is the Devil also forms the first instalment in the Guardian's British cult classics season, for which we have teamed up with the BFI to screen a selection of tasty back-catalogue items that perhaps haven't quite had their due in the past. Each film is priced at £1.99 to stream, and £4.99 to download. We'll have four weeks of films, adding new ones each Friday – and in the spirit of the now largely vanished rep cinema circuit, we'll be pairing them as double bills. Look out in the coming weeks for Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels, Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts, and Terence Davies's Distant Voices, Still Lives, among other treats.

This week though, we've matched Love Is the Devil with Derek Jarman's 1986 film Caravaggio, another brilliant film about an artist that shares a great deal with Love Is the Devil – and not least in its prescient unearthing of star beefcake-to-be. Jarman, rather astonishingly, handed the young Sean Bean a prominent role as Caravaggio's model Ranuccio. Caravaggio was also Jarman's most ambitious attempt at cracking the mainstream market: while his special cocktail of performance art, gay erotica and technical experimentation was perhaps never destined for a mass audience, the film is arguably his most accessible and substantial achievement. Maybury emerged from not dissimilar avant-garde circles as Jarman, and clearly learned much of his aesthetic from the older man – even working as an editor on Jarman's incendiary 1988 feature The Last of England – and it's possible to conceive that, had Jarman survived, his career in the 90s and noughties might have transformed itself and followed a similar trajectory to Maybury's, into boutique arthouse and high-end TV.